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Comment by pkaye | Hacker News Reader

I don't have an iPhone myself but do use hearing aids. I'm glad the big tech companies are paying attention to such details. There are a lot of little details of the hearing aid bluetooth experience that could be improved by all manufacturers. I just want instantaneous switching between multiple bluetooth devices.

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That's something Apple is doing already with their bluetooth W1 chip. Unfortunately only among their devices.

I wish this feature would be adopted by many other manufacturers. And that generally, the bluetooth pairing was faster.

I've been hearing about Bluetooth LE Audio standard which should help a lot but its just started to be offered in hearing aids. Right now you have to choose between the Apple approach, Google approach or standard bluetooth each with their own limitations.

It does not work as you'd imagine. It doesn't work for anyone - particularly switching from ios to macos as the currently playing device. It works the other way around fine, and even between iOS and iPadOS. But not iOS to macOS. Other headsets that simply support connecting to multiple devices at a time end up providing a better experience since you can switch between devices easier than with Airpods switching. I'm unsure about how the Airpods Max performs but I'm willing to bet it's the same way.

I think you're referring to automatic switching, which is a much newer feature. That indeed is broken iOS to macOS.

But the instantaneous switching works fine in my experience and has since the original AirPods.

As far as I understand, Apple laptops still mostly (all?) use Broadcom chipsets for Bluetooth, instead of Apple's own W1 chipset that includes the enhanced connectivity features.

I'm not sure why, instant handoff between a laptop and a phone seems like such a natural workflow for anyone who does a mix of phone calls and videoconferencing.

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